Board of Supervisors hears report on cleaning up Chesapeake Bay

GLOUCESTER — A crackdown on pollutants in Chesapeake Bay could be costly to Gloucester County residents, while proving to be a bureaucratic quagmire for local officials.

The Gloucester Board of Supervisors received an overview of the pollutants crackdown last week from Marty Schlesinger, director of Gloucester's Public Utilities Department.

Schlesinger said that in the effort to clean up Chesapeake Bay, the federal Environmental Protection Agency wants states to monitor and then reduce the amounts of pollutants — nitrogen, phosphorous and sediment — entering the bay. The EPA wants to monitor the pollutants by calculating the total maximum daily loads, or TMDLs, that can safely be discharged into the bay from six sources: agriculture, forest, urban, septic, waste water treatments plants and livestock operations.

States are required to achieve 60 percent of the TMDL reductions by 2017. The state will conduct reviews in 2013 and again in 2015 to see how localities are doing in reducing pollutants in the bay, Schlesinger said.

The pollutant reduction methods are expected to come in many forms, including potentially expanding the public sewer system, increasing alternative septic systems, encouraging the continued use of no-till farming methods and installing structures to control runoff in rural areas where lands are logged and farmed.

"The TMDL program will not go away," Schlesinger said. "It's here to stay."

The pollutant monitoring is done with a mathematical model, Schlesinger said. In 2017, the EPA will run the mathematical model and decide if the states are meeting the 60 percent goal.

If the goal isn't met, a federal crackdown that includes regulations possibly leading to increasing development fees and lowered building starts, among others, could be implemented. The federal government could effectively wrest control of development and storm water control and farming and logging practices from states and localities, Schlesinger said.

"Unfortunately, we may be trying to achieve compliance with a mathematical program rather than cleaning up Chesapeake Bay," Schlesinger said.

How the localities meets the EPA mandates is a concern to Gloucester supervisors.

Supervisor John Northstein quoted a farmer who once told him years ago that he knows they leave the land in a better place than they found it.